We’re excited to welcome Rachel Zollinger to our faculty this Fall as our newest professor in Art Education.
Rachel Zollinger is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and scholar whose research explores multispecies and emplaced pedagogies at the intersection of science, environmental, and art education. Her work investigates diverse ways of inhabiting and knowing the world through creative practice, bringing together drawing, mixed-media sculpture, digital media, site-specific installation, socioecological performance, writing, and teaching. Inspired by the relationships between people and place, rocks, roots, rivers, grasses, and lichens are among her recurring aesthetic and methodological influences.
Rachel earned her PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education, with a minor in Science Education, from the University of Arizona, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Sierra Nevada College, and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. She has worked extensively in community spaces, museums, and other informal learning environments, developing arts integration curricula and environmental education programming.
In addition to her creative and teaching practice, Rachel serves as an editor for the International Journal for Education Through Art, an associate editor for the interdisciplinary plant studies journal Plant Perspectives, and is a co-founder of Submergence Collective, an art and ecology research group.
Please join us in welcoming Rachel Zollinger to the Department of Art. We look forward to what she will bring to our Art Education program and to our students.
We are thrilled to announce the publication of Listening Pedagogies: Creative and Arts-Based Approaches for Education in Unstable Times (Routledge, October 2026), co-edited by Art Education Professor Gigi Schroeder Yu, alongside Mitsy KwangDae Chung, University of Western Ontario, and Dr. Jo Pollitt, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
We’re pleased to share that MFA student Hanna Brody has received a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, a Canadian nonprofit organization based in Montreal that supports emerging representational artists worldwide.
The exhibition catalogue for Voces del Pueblo: Artists of the Levantamiento Chicano in New Mexico has received wonderful recognition, winning three awards so far.